Striving for a flattering eulogy

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The Best Never Have a Solution

Some problems just keep getting worse, no matter how much we exacerbate them. That’s largely become the accepted problem paradigm in the late liberal West. X creates Y social pathologies, which leads to more X in an effort to alleviate Y. It’s an indulgent ignorance that our forebears didn’t have the luxury to indulge.

Unfortunately, the West’s timeline of recoverable ignorance isn’t infinite. Consider the ongoing fertility deficit. If a generation is 25 years and single children are all that can be managed, then a community of 100 families shrinks to six in one century. And pivoting from many to few is precisely how one’s posterity becomes privileged oppressors.

Of course you have to import alien peoples to call them that, but who else is going to pay for your Pakistani proctologist? You only had one kid.

That’s the conundrum being contemplated in this article about Finland’s sterile maternity wards, and what they imply for its lavish social welfare model.

Finland’s Welfare State Has a Massive Baby Problem

You know you’ve got a problem when even the best don’t have the solution.

You need to start asking the worst.

Finland, a first-rate place in which to be a mother, has registered the lowest number of newborns in nearly 150 years. The birth rate has been falling steadily since the start of the decade, and there’s little to suggest a reversal in the trend.

Demographics are a concern across the developed world, of course. But they are particularly problematic for countries with a generous welfare state, since they endanger its long-term survival.

Right, the Finnish people might expire. And that could pose a real problem for the economy.

For Heidi Schauman, the statistics are “frightening.”

At least someone feels compassion for the ledger books.

“They show how fast our society is changing, and we don’t have solutions ready to stop the development,” the Aktia Bank chief economist said in a telephone interview in Helsinki. “We have a large public sector and the system needs taxpayers in the future.”

To do that, the fertility rate should equal two per woman, Schauman says. It was projected at 1.57 in 2016, according to Statistics Finland.

That’s a surprisingly low level, given the efforts made by the state to support parenthood.

What were these efforts, precisely?

Perhaps nothing illustrates those [efforts] better than Finland’s famous baby-boxes.

So the lure of perfunctory pregnancy care packages haven’t been sufficient to counteract a lifetime of glossy feminist fantasies and anti-natalist propaganda? The only thing I can think to change is maybe go with a rhombus-shaped baby box. Have you tried anything else?

Offering generous parental leave and one of the best education systems in the world doesn’t seem to be working either.

It’s interesting when writers use the concept of despite as a synonym of because. For instance, despite thoroughly “educating” them, Finland’s young women remain disinclined to bear children. Perhaps Finnish educational institutions haven’t integrated the following graphs into their curricula.

Maybe if Finland could entice more of its girls to stay in school until 40 they could begin to compete on fertility with the Congolese.

I told them they needed help from the worst. But…

What to do?

Reversing the modern idea that it’s ok not to have kids is impracticable.

No, actually it’s completely practicable. Owing to the left’s unparalleled skill at the craft, I have come to hold an enormous respect for the potency of propaganda. And just as its feminist incarnation has put Finland into a fertility swoon, so could it return obstetricians back to the employment rolls. The force of accusatory ists and isms can be applied to barren females just as easily as it has to patriotic nationalists. The left didn’t say “reversing the idea that it’s ok not to be ‘diverse’ is impracticable.” They simply went about reversing the idea. In comparison to something so counterintuitive and self-annihilating as that, convincing women to merely have babies would be like talking a Somali into Stockholm.

But the first task in massaging natalist themes into pretty heads is to stop telling them that cube farms and marketing reports are their highest spiritual calling. However the Finns have found that to be impracticable.

Finally, the author quipped (perhaps sincerely) that Helsinki should exclude condoms from the baby-boxes. In response, I would guess Finns are having a sufficient volume of unprotected sex already. It is simply that the fruits of which are being nullified by birth control pills and abortions. Yet while neither of these pillars may be examined by writers who wish to remain unspoiled by allegations of War on Womening, we are left only with solutions more flaccid than Bruce Jenner’s member: Umm, maybe fuck more?

No, that’s not it either. Neither is something called “gender equality” or prolific Afghan daycares. The solution is to offer powerful financial incentives sufficient to induce a fertility inflection, while simultaneously fostering a cultural milieu that encourages the stay-at-home mothers that make it feasible. People can be trained to compete on family formation just as they have been trained to compete on prog virtue signaling.

Give me control of the Finnish airwaves and social welfare outlays and I’ll give them a double TFR in one generation. It’s time to listen to the worst.

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An honest and holistic assessment of this problem would necessarily have to evaluate the entire European liberal welfare model. This being one that simultaneously demands perpetual population growth while discouraging the large families that are its only legitimate source. This structural contradiction has been the impetus (some earnest but idiotic, most simply malign) for much of the immigration treason of modern Western governments.

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38 thoughts on “The Best Never Have a Solution”

The Happiness Index (or Satisfaction Index, if either exists) should be weighed heavily, if not solely, on TFR. Online/phone/sidewalk surveys can be faked; but human reproduction gives the ultimate yelp review on a society’s fitness for continuation. High TFR: “I very much like this place, and recommend it highly to my kids and grandkids.” Low TFR: “This place sucks. Wouldn’t wish it upon my worst enemy. Stay away!”
Porter, if your campaign for Finland Minister of Propaganda is successful, I know you’ll have higher priorities, but please don’t overlook the beauty pageant problem. This one could have put them into negative TFR, if the Finns placed much stock in it. “Not even with Bruce Jenner’s dick.”

In developed nations, I do believe child production is at least somewhat related to optimism, but in places like Africa, I think its just a reflection of the low intelligence, low impulse control, and lack of care or interest for one’s children that result in such high birth rates.

Then what do sub-Saharans have to be optimistic about, malaria? The reason those sub-Saharans have 10 kids is because 3 will die before age 12 and the rest are needed to support the parents as they age. Give them welfare and Social Security and then check their TFR.

Maybe it is time to add barren-shaming to the glorius fat-shaming.
“Is your pussy broken or what?” for example, but the possibilities are endless. Apply it to any woman over 25 with less than 2 kids.
At the same time shower women with large families in adoring attention. Women love attention.

I vaguely remember a movie about a bunch of dummies having a bunch of kids. Something also about 500 years later they were watering crops with a Gatorade-type substance… While white people breeding less than muds is a problem, it won’t help if stupid whites are the only ones breeding more than intelligent whites.

My “smart white” family is having plenty of kids. Worrying about the collective, however, is a waste of time. If the lemmings insist on self-destruction, there’s not a thing any of us will do about it. OTOH, we’ve gone a long time without a really good crisis. Sooner or later there will be a major period of culling, and if you’ve paid much attention to the stars of our Idiocracy, getting culled should not prove difficult for most of them.

“if you’ve paid much attention to the stars of our Idiocracy, getting culled should not prove difficult for most of them.”

I literally laughed out loud on that one. It is surprising that more of them haven’t self-culled at this point. Only through miracles of modern society have many of them survived to adult hood, or are currently surviving what passes for adulthood for much of the America populace. Some slight reversion to a society that lacks the ability or desire to mitigate some of the various hazards that plagued humanity until the last century would probably result in quite a culling. Hell, just removing various warning labels from household chemicals, tools, and appliances might be enough.

What you say about the lemmings is true as well. My wife and I have three kids and are done. Its a shame to see the demographic direction of our country caused by low white birth rates, but at the same time, when interacting with many of them today, I often have the thought that its a good thing these people aren’t reproducing in great numbers.

This discussion is astonishingly parallel to the USA’s monetary madness since 1964/1981. In ’64 the money American citizens used was floated free of a consistent metal yardstick and drifted into Fiat waters. In 1981 the secular bond market bear ended, and ever since then, holding the long term (dollar-denominated) debts of governments and corporations yielded huge capital gains.

Congress learned it could borrow and spend instead of tax and spend. Spending skyrocketed and taxes were cut. Manufacturing was relocated from high cost USA to low cost China et.al., but retail sales naturally stayed in the high price USA, so arbitrage between the two was a Gold Mine (Thank you Sam Walton!) The limiting factor was the number of people stuffed into the retail channel, which largely explains the Chamber of Commerce’s support for Open Borders…intended to flood the retail channel and continue to make them rich.

America’s promises of future cash flows, from $200 trillion in IOU’s floated into the Bond Ocean to pensions, free healthcare, social security, rapidly rising SSDI roles, etc. is much like the vaunted European social democracy cradle-to-grave all-you-want matriarchal gig. The Scandinavian model rests on taxpayers, and of course, those who WORK for the welfare bureaucracy don’t actually PAY taxes. It is only those OUTSIDE of the government network whose productivity accrues to that which actually pays taxes.

Just as the Welfarists in Europe rest their handouts on actual net taxpayers (who are declining rapidly, the hole in which immigrants are supposed to fill but–of course–given their certainly negative net productivity, this is a sad joke), all the future cash flows promised to Americans (and worldwide holders of US IOU’s) rests on capital formation and industry…the very things dismantled and shipped out of North America. Industries in America that have skyrocketed these past 36 years (medical services, higher ed, welfare administration, military, banking/insurance) are all largely paid for by BORROWED MONEY. Their contribution to “productivity” is thus an illusion.

Both of these situations are rather like Farmer Pinko’s farm:
1. Farmer Pinko invites all his buddies over for a barbecue on Friday. They slaughter a pig and cook some corn and drink some Apple Pie ‘shine, and everyone is having a great good time. Rather than let the party end, Central Bankers show up with methamphetamines and the party goes on, through Saturday, into Sunday. Along the way, revelers got hungry so they slaughtered and cooked Farmer Pinko’s breeder pigs, his dairy cows, the horses and even his hunting dogs. The revelers broke into the grain silo and ate all his seeds for the next Spring planting. It got a little cool at night so they broke up the barn and paddock and put it all on the fire.

2. Revelers all signed IOU’s to Farmer Pinko, saying they’ll replace his stuff…but none of them are farmers, and the swarthy people who speak other languages (who the revelers invited without asking Farmer Pinko) can’t farm, either.

3. Economists count up all the stuff consumed and add it to GDP. It was a GREAT WEEKEND! they declare. They also count up the value of all those IOU’s and that, too, is added to GDP because they are essentially an accounting receivable.

4. Of course, there’s nothing left on which to feed anyone in future months, much less make good on the IOU’s. Experts are completely baffled how this came to be.

Sadly, I’m a one trick pony. For 22 years I’ve done a Chicken Little dance and here we are, the blinking sky STILL hasn’t fallen. The effrontery! I think if I wrote a blog it would rapidly become a recorded loop. That is, until this stopped clock was finally right…which is a forecast I’ve finally learned to (mostly) stop giving.

I recall what Mises said about his life, not too far from the end. He said (paraphrasing of course) “I intended to be an agent of change. Instead, all I became was a chronicler of decline.”

You know what will piss me off? When some new guy comes along, gets Red Pilled (or whatever term you prefer), says, “Holy shit, Batman, the sky is about to fall” and IT DOES.

The guy (and everyone who was within earshot of him) will think he’s F-ing brilliant. All the rest of us will be dumbfounded at his (good) timing and our exhaustion from playing….(yep) Chicken Little.

The world goes by itself. I see nothing that changes it from the tortured path it is predestined to travel (with us as grateful parasites sitting on its back, given that our alternatives are somewhat limited.) The collective is always doomed. I guess I hope some of us (Nock’s Remnant) still find a way to prosper and enjoy life. I know I’ve thoroughly enjoyed a traditional Ozzie and Harriet kind of existence (one wife, kids, now grandkids, etc.) As a happy person, I sincerely like to see others travel Happiness Path. (Which given my natural glass-half-empty outlook is just another of Life’s paradoxes.)

22 years is a long time, I’ve only been doing it since 2011. As impatient as I’ve been getting waiting for the sky to fall for the last 6 years, you must be positively infuriated. Although at this point, we’ve seen so many stick saves, I will probably be the last man on earth to believe it’s actually happening when it does. The key to not looking like too much of a chicken little is not putting a date on it. I sure as hell don’t know when it will be, but I can say with a high degree of confidence that “it” will happen eventually. We are just doing far too many profoundly stupid things all at once for it not to. Or, you can be like Martin Armstrong, and just change your date every couple years and just pretend you never made the old prediction. It seems like every time I read something from someone who puts an actual date on it they are trying to sell me something, anyways. Usually an investment newsletter, trying to get me to buy land in Argentina, or both.

I have a wife and kids too. Primary source of joy in my life. Just trying to leave some semblance of America for my kids when the reach my ripe old age of 32. Hopefully they don’t have to wind up as cynical as me, too, its tiring, both to me, and to those around me. My dad has been telling me Im way to cynical for my age since I was about 18. I suppose we are all destined to be chroniclers of decline, unfortunately. Hard to imagine a way to stop it now. “striving for a flattering eulogy” indeed.

32? Same age as my oldest kid. We’re all passengers on this Titanic, and the clowns steering are as clueless as we are, plus have the handicap of thinking they’re masters of the Universe.

I used to think there were people smarter than me who could navigate the future and tell me what to do. It took massive losses and nearly 20 years to learn that there are two ways to make money consistently in the markets: Own part of the casino or sell to the the rubes your sure-fire, super-duper, no-one-else-knows-this-secret secret to beat it. Boy was I a rube.

I’ve since decided that I should cultivate resilience (Taleb’s “anti-fragile?”) and stop worrying so much. Smart people who have their eyes open rarely starve and usually see the signs of impending REAL disaster and relocate a bit to avoid the pogrom. I think we’ll know it when we see it, and unlike our neighbors who largely will ignore the evidence of their eyes, we’ll simply tweak our actions enough to manage. I encourage my kids to live in Plan A (the world as it is) because no one knows when things will change. I figure its my job to be the fall-back position, and that’s how I’m arranged, some in Plan A, some in Plan B and a little in Plan C (I don’t prep for Plan D, the zombie apocalypse.)

Here’s a free, possibly useful tip: It will be more likely that the 36 year boom is over when a chart of the SPX breaks below its 13 and 26 month Exponential Moving Averages. The dead giveaway is in the past, there was always an inevitable rally after the break, and if the rally gets back above those EMA’s and bounces higher above them, turning them back up, the rally will resume higher. If, however, the rally gets to the underside of those EMA’s and falls back away from them. prep the lifeboat. [I do not recommend betting on a downturn. While it can be done (I doubled a small capital-at-risk in 2008), my experience is that for every dollar you “make,” you’ll still end up losing 10 dollars by getting surprised by rallies. I wish I’d never opened a brokerage account. I also wish I’d have bought $100 in bitcoins 7 years ago….I’d have 6 or 7 million dollars now.]

If the Rocket Man doesn’t nuke them first, I suspect the Japs will provide an excellent template for how a high IQ and low TFR society can thrive. Hint; it starts with accepting about 26 immigrants a year.
Norway is doing a better job than most in Europe, but damn that oil backstop is convenient.

Every story about “declining population” never asks the relevant question: How is the standard of living? The USA in which I was a small child had a whole lot fewer people, and as I recall it was a much nicer place to live than now.

Wealth transfer schemes (mostly young to old) rest on a new crop of young people to farm, but it seems to me that this is not an inevitability. But Porter’s take is spot on here. Also, as I understand it, Japan’s population could shrink quite a bit from now and still be larger than it was 50 years ago. Which also makes me wistful for the open spaces of my youth.

I fully agree. In its essence, the means for survival comes from the bounty of the earth. Even if we’re told that importing the 3rd World is the key. The current population is provided for through completely unsustainable means–dredging oceans, growing crops in round-up and dumping pharmaceuticals on livestock. 7 Billion and climbing. Environmentalists used to worry about such things, but now just chime in occasionally for climate accords.

watership10, you nailed it. In the 1970’s all we heard about was how we were polluting the world, running out of landfill space, etc., etc. What happened to all that? Without looking, I’d guess the USA’s population was 2/3rds of what it is now. [This is not to mention the billions forecast to be added by sub-Saharan Africa to the mix.]

I recently read that vast amounts of clothing gets “donated” to Goodwill or Salvation Army after being worn ONCE. ONCE! Women shop, buy, wear it once and donate it, rinse and repeat. When they’re not virtue-signaling to climb their little status-ladder, they’re climbing it via conspicuous consumption.

That’s what passes for “values” today. Mountains of clothing, barely worn, spends a month on the resale shop rack, then gets LANDFILLED.

When this 36 Popular Delusion finally ends, people are going to completely lose it, because all at once they will re-frame all of the data that surrounds us, the data that they currently ignore, and when they do so they will be like Bernie Madoff’s starry-eyed victims, discovering the sugarplums dancing in their heads are steaming dog turds that can’t even be used as fertilizer. The ensuing epidemic of rage should be astounding.

The relationship between female education attainment and fertility has to be worse in the USA than anywhere, given the pressure on young female graduates to “justify” the crushing costs/debt of their freshly minted degree.

Parental malpractice contributes. A young woman I know spent almost $200k on a degree in a peculiar subset of art, and she could work in her occupation for a decade and not cover that with what’s left after living expenses. Her parents are, by definition, morons. Only intervention by a kind stranger (the young man she married) will give her the financial space to bear children. Paying off her debt was a kind of reverse dowry.

Maybe to base your retirement off of taxes that your offspring have removed in their income tax, would encourage people to have more kids, because surely 5 kids would have to pay less in taxes then one kid who must support both parents.

Maybe give each family, a 100k loan, at marriage for a house down payments, and for each child they have, forgive the loan 25k. 4 children pays the loan off completely, and they have a house for their children.

“Certain genres of music attract certain “types” of people. The management reserves the right to not host certain types of events that may attract certain types of people that may result in certain types of ‘problematic’ behaviour.”

Sound reasonable? NO ! You RACIST! read on:
(the following is a copy-paste of a comment I made at Morgoth’s Review)

PLANET GUARDIAN:

Met to review risk assessment form ‘stifling’ grime and garage scenes
London mayor Sadiq Khan orders review of the 696 form, long used to target a disproportionate number of music events by black and Asian artists

TRANSLATION: Police back down under pressure from NOG /ZOG , now venues can no longer “discriminate” about whether they want to put on events that may (will) attract the wrong sorts
(stabby drug-dealing acid-chucking NOGS)

‘The Metropolitan police are to review their 696 form, which critics have said is used to unfairly target grime, garage and basement venues.

The PAKI MUZZ London mayor, Sadiq Khan, has asked for the form to be re-examined after meeting several DJs, artists and venue owners, who all raised concerns about how it is being used.

The form, which was first introduced in 2005 as a risk assessment for live music to prevent violence, has long been used to target a disproportionate number of music events by black and Asian artists, particularly garage, grime and bashment.

PAKI MUZZ Khan said that the form “shouldn’t compromise the capital’s vibrant grassroots music industry or unfairly target one coonmutiny or music genre”.

Here’s my bad idea for consideration: a freedom of education constitutional amendment, requiring that local govt gives EVERY kid a voucher equal to 100% of the amount spent per kid in the local school system (times) the kids % score on an annual test. Let people figure out the most efficient way to get good grades. This would replace perverse incentives with positive ones in a marvelous way.

10,000$ * a couple kids is a powerful motivation for moms to stay home and oversee their kids education – something many would like to do if they could afford to. Those who’d prefer to work would be better able to afford a good school (private schools don’t have to put up with bad behavior). The kids would be able to get out of dangerous/ shitty schools based on their effort – I’d be inclined to give the kids a % of the money – they’ll work pretty hard for small money, and benefit from an environment where effort is rewarded. The parents of dim kids could be allowed to opt out and just leave their kids to the public schools, buuut: these would be exactly the kids to benefit most from intensive parental involvement and alternative schooling methods – even if the best they could ever do would be 50% scores, their parents would still be getting a good check, and private schools might offer aid for a dumb kid with a good attitude.

Note that this would also foster a culture of continuing education, as opposed to our current system of subsidizing sluttiness and rewarding low effort and intolerance of having a husband around. A single mom with a couple kids could earn enough this way to get off of welfare programs, and selecting a good father would no longer have the unappealing downside of losing benefits, and have the notable upside of disciplinary help and being around to give the mom a break.

The school system is an atrocity we only tolerate because we have become used to it. There’s gotta be a better way. This would be a great opportunity for (R)s to help the blacks who suffer most from bad schools – it’s not like they need fear the loss of teachers votes. And it’d be a well deserved kick in the pants to the ed establishment – but the good teachers would have good demand

“Attitudes are the greatest disability”. IQ is over-emphasized IMHO the attitudes are a big factor in getting the dim kids up to at least usable functional skills. Having kids spend 12 years being taught by govt employed union members is not a way to teach good attitudes , especially to the dim or easily misled kids.